


it's been forty minutes since the end of this world

by sinkingsidewalks



Series: i want to be able to love you (without it hurting this much) [5]
Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: Angst, F/M, Miscarriage mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-31
Updated: 2018-05-31
Packaged: 2019-05-16 16:05:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14814528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinkingsidewalks/pseuds/sinkingsidewalks
Summary: There’s a doctor talking to them about viability and chance and that’s all he remembers.





	it's been forty minutes since the end of this world

**Author's Note:**

> I don't have anything to say about this one except I hope I got it right. I'm still not totally sure that I did.  
> This is a work of complete fiction.

There’s a doctor talking to them about viability and chance and that’s all he remembers. 

He can’t really hear. There’s a single loop, repeating in his brain, one that’s moved on from _baby, baby, baby_ to _Tessa, Tessa, Tessa_ , so loud it clouds everything else out. It’s familiar at least. A more pressing version of the spiral that he’s had running in his mind for about as long as he can remember. 

Her gaze stares straight through and scours a hole in the wall but her eyes are empty, hollow and unseeing. She hasn’t stopped crying since she woke him but from the way she’s pushing back her tears with her fingertips before they’ll spill over her cheeks, he knows she’s not in much physical pain any longer.

The doctor leaves with an apologetic smile. Tessa takes a breath, but doesn’t say anything. 

 

He calls Patch as the sun’s setting to tell him he won’t make it to the rink tomorrow. 

“’Allo?” Patch answers, some mixture of French and English, and Scott, upon hearing the man’s voice who’s been such a support for him, since he was a teenager, who’s been a role model, who’s been like a second dad, shatters apart into sobs. 

He cries for he doesn’t know how long, listening to Patrice’s concern and the mild clattering of the rink late at night before he’s passed on to Marie-France. 

At some point he manages to choke out to her ‘hospital’ and ‘baby’ and ‘gone’. 

“Oh, mon cherie.” She whispers.

He keeps crying. He can hear them confer between themselves in French in the background. 

“Scott.” She says, insistent all of a sudden, demanding an answer. “Is Tessa all right?”

“Yeah.” He coughs, tries to take a deep breath. It’s a lie. He looks at her through the glass hallway, laying there, tiny in the sea of the hospital bed. Her eyes are closed but he can tell she’s not asleep. There are tears on her cheeks but he doesn’t know if they’re fresh. 

The doctor gave her something, to calm her down, a couple of hours ago, when she was crying so hard she wasn’t breathing and he’d held her against his chest trying and trying to level her breaths out with his. It hadn’t worked.

Tessa is not all right. 

He knows what they mean anyway. 

He gives them the name of the hospital and Marie assures him she’s on her way. 

“Scott.” Patch says once she’s gone and he hasn’t hung up. His voice is even, steady and reassuring. “You’re going to be okay, Scott. You’re going to get through this, together.”

If only he knew.

 

“Tess? Kiddo?” He says reflexively, their eyes meet and they both swallow hard. He breaks his gaze away and sits down on the chair dragged up to the edge of the bed. 

“I called Patch, Marie’s gonna come, if that’s okay?”

She nods. Her eyes are wet; she stares into the blank screen of the television. He’d had to rip the cords out of the wall to turn it off. 

“Do you want,” he swallows. “Do you want me to call your mom? Or Jordan? Or?” He doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do. This wasn’t in any of the guide books. 

She grabs his hand, squeezing it so tightly he can feel their bones press together. She crushes his hand, as if she could truly meld them together, and keeps staring. 

Her tears fall again. He drops his head down to the mattress by her hip.

 

The next morning, they release her with only a word of warning about continued bleeding. They wheel her out the front door in a wheelchair which she protests, but not enough, and when they get past the sliding glass doors she shudders against the biting December air even wrapped up in his jacket.

Scott drives home with both hands gripped tight on the wheel, turning his knuckles white, and in the passenger seat she puts her feet up on the dash. It bothers him, just like it always does, but he relishes in the chance to feel anything at all.

When they get home, she rushes into the house and he sits in the driveway staring at his hands. They weren’t enough to protect them. _He_ wasn’t.

He goes inside.

She’s standing in the living room. Beside the couch which he feels like he hasn’t seen in a decade. Her phone’s sitting in her hand like a foreign language. She must have dropped it there when they were rushing to leave. Everything’s too slow now. 

“Tessa?” he asks, four feet away from her.

The blankets are refolded, the decorative cushions positioned. She must have done that, he thinks, just now. 

She takes a shuddering breath. “I should call Kate.” She looks up at him, her eyes faded, an exaggerated version of defeat. “And you should call Alma.”

He nods, but doesn’t take out his phone. It’s been burning a hole in his pocket all night. He doesn’t know what he would say. Doesn’t know how to frame language around the new hole carved into his chest. 

“I’ll make breakfast, eh?” 

She doesn’t reply.

In the kitchen, the fridge is still covered in photographs. Bile rises in his throat, the autonomic response to overwhelming pain, and he retches burnt coffee into the kitchen sink. 

“Mom?” he can hear her on the phone in the other room, a calculated distance in her tone. 

Once she goes to bed, he pulls each one off, laying them carefully in a box, until it’s bare of any magnets at all. 

 

She stays in bed the first two days. He mostly stays with her. He cooks, brings her food, runs her a bath, and tries not to feel so much like everything is ripping apart. 

It’s so _boring_. He’s astounded by the sheer lack of it all. There’s no screaming. No dramatic swell of music. It feels like everything’s on fire, but there’s no smoke. 

They watch _Planet Earth_. He cries some more, and she doesn’t. He burns through half a loaf of bread making toast because he can’t stop staring at the empty refrigerator. 

 

On the third day she all but begs him to get back to the rink. Patch told him to take all the time he needed, that he’d arrange for Scott’s teams to be covered and Scott’s pretty sure that meant for more than a couple days. He doesn’t want to leave her but he knows she’s probably desperate for some space so he goes. 

Marie gives him a too long, too tight hug that almost brings more tears to his eyes. Patch claps a hand onto his shoulder as they stand side by side at the boards and doesn’t let go. He loses himself in the familiar monotony of music and footwork and he’s glad to be there, doing something, even if some of the skaters, the few that knew, give him looks filled with pitying sympathy. 

He comes back in the evening to an empty house and panics. Thoughts spiral through his mind. 

_What if she’s sick? What if she’s hurt? What if she’s dying?_

But the one that overwhelms them all completely is:

_What if she’s gone?_

He texts her even though he knows he’s being crazy. He _knows_ that she’s perfectly capable, and has probably just gone to the store or to grab coffee or to meet a friend. She wouldn’t just up and leave, not after everything. 

_Went out for a run_ , comes her response three agonizing minutes later. He breathes again and crashes onto their bed, straight into sleep. 

 

On the fourth day he wakes at dawn and wonders if she was there at all. He goes downstairs to find half the boxes from the basement piled in the living room and all of the furniture rearranged. 

She’s stringing a strand of Christmas lights over the mantle, wearing leggings and a Canada shirt of his that might be from Vancouver. Her hair is messy, falling out of an elastic and there’s a light sheen of sweat covering the back of her neck and she’s contemplating these goddamn Christmas lights like they’re an Olympic program.

She’s so breathtaking, she stops his heart.

He wraps himself around her from behind, folding her arms in and burying his nose in her neck. “Hey.”

She gives his wrist a quick squeeze then quietly disentangles, going back to her lights. 

“What’s up with this?” He asks when she doesn’t explain. 

“I was thinking it might be,” she hesitates over a word choice, then decides. “Easier if we spent Christmas here. I know we said we’d alternate but…”

He’d forgotten about the holidays completely. They had flights booked for a week in London with their families. 

“Okay.” He answers in slow motion, once he realizes that’s what he wants too. “But are you sure you don’t want to see your mom-“

Her head shakes rapidly, her hair slips a little looser. “No, I just _can’t_.” She takes a deep breath. “Unless you want to see Alma or?”

“No.” He hugs her again, she lets him hang on this time. “I don’t want to see anyone but you.” He says, knowing that it’s not quite true, there’s one other person he’d do anything to see, but they’re gone now. 

“Do you want to get a tree?” He asks into her shoulder. 

She shakes her head. “No, this is enough.”

 

A week passes, then two. He keeps going to the rink every day. She throws herself back into work. The motions, at least, feel right. 

He loses track of the number of days. 

 

Sometime in January, he finds her in the bathroom with the shower running staring down her reflection in the full length mirror. It reminds him of the early years in Canton. The days of weekly weigh ins and nothing but carrot sticks and black coffee. When she’d pick apart every piece of her body and determine how to make it lesser.

He kisses her shoulder. “You’re beautiful.”

Her eyebrows tighten together and her gaze shoots down, away from both their reflections and to her stomach. 

The bump is still there, smaller, but it was never big to begin with. She’d hardly started showing at all, a mix according to the doctor, of a first pregnancy and her excellent musculature. He’d been in awe of that little outward curve though, had spent hours pressing his palm there, or gentle kisses, whispering secrets and love while she quirked one eyebrow in fond amusement. 

He knocks the memories aside. She’s so strong. If she doesn’t believe his words, he’ll show her instead.

Steam piles into the room. His hands slide down her waist and pause over her hips asking, silently, like he always does, _do you want this?_

She tips her head back, pulling him into a desperate, mind numbing, kiss, answering, _God, please._

 

“Tessa?” he asks, cautiously. He’s on his side of the bed, propped up on one arm with a pillow shoved beneath him watching her, and she’s on hers. 

“Yeah?” She hardly glances up from her book. 

He bites his lip. He doesn’t want to rush her. That’s what he read when he caved and googled how the hell they were supposed to handle this. They weren’t supposed to push themselves to be okay. 

“Wedding?” he asks like he’s approaching a deer caught in a wire fence, like if he scares her, she might just bleed them both. He might mean, _do you still want to marry me?_ But she’s still wearing the ring. 

She sucks in a breath sharper than a kitchen knife. Then, she slowly marks her page and sets the book on her bedside table. She turns to him, raw and honest. “I don’t know, Scott.”

He reaches halfway across the bed, sets his hand amidst the sheets. “That’s okay.” 

She doesn’t take it. 

 

They finally go back home. Or to Ontario, Montreal has been home to him ever since she was there. There’s a big Moir family Sunday dinner that Tess dives right into. 

It mostly goes unspoken. He gets a few more hugs and there’s an extra weight when people ask, _how are you doing, Scotty?_ But no one brings it right up. 

He watches Tessa laugh with his cousins through dinner and subtly dodge being handed off his new baby nephew. The kid is adorable, of course he is, but his eyes are pure milky brown, not a hint of green or hazel. Scott tries too hard not to stare. 

“So do you think you guys are gonna try again?” One of his stupid, careless, idiotic relatives asks after a few too many drinks. Dinner’s done with and the kids are all screaming in the basement or passed out in their parents’ laps. The rest of the adults mill about in the living room, grouped off into conversations. 

He feels Tessa freeze from across the room. 

“Uh.” He can tell she’s listening. “I don’t know.”

She flees to the kitchen under the guise of collecting dishes. He follows her. 

She’s scrubbing at a pot in the sink with enough force to scour through the metal, every line of her back and shoulders tensed. She doesn’t turn when he enters the room but he knows she notices. 

She brushes her hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand and stares into the sink. “I don’t-“

“I know.” He puts a hand between her shoulder blades but she doesn’t relax. 

They go back to Montreal and it doesn’t come up again. 

 

He touches her and she flinches. Like his hand is a branding iron, scouring her skin. That’s never happened before. 

Even through their worst fights, all the times they’ve hurt each other, when he thought they were beyond repair, her body was still his home. Where he knew every corner and curve, every bit of chipped paint and each loose floorboard. He could walk around her with his eyes closed and never doubt a step. 

She flinches every time he touches her. 

He stops touching her.

 

He wakes at dawn to nothing but the sunrise. Tessa’s awake too, but neither of them move. He never knows the date but this morning it’s like it’s seared onto the inside of his eyelids. 

_May 11th_

Tessa breathes, harder than usual, and he knows she’s started crying. He rolls over and pulls her into his arms. Her tears soak through his t-shirt and his dampen her hair. 

“We would’ve had a baby.” Tessa whispers, reverent. It’s too real.  
He fists his hands in the back of her shirt and holds her tighter until he can imagine that he can feel her heart beating right against his own. She doesn’t let go.

“When do we call it?” She asks, quietly but clearly, into his chest; tears dry on her cheeks. The sun sears through the sky. 

“I don’t know.”

At what point does the CPR become redundant? When do they stop beating life back into the corpse of their relationship? They’ve never known how to do anything but fight for it. 

She shudders. “I still…”

_Love you? Want you? Need you?_

“Me too, Tess.” He kisses her forehead. “Me too.”

 

He’s cutting up vegetables in the kitchen, his back to the fridge, when she brings up his parent’s anniversary. 

“You should go.” She says lightly, poking over his shoulder to steal a carrot stick. 

“Don’t you have a meeting on the 20th?” There’s a party on the 19th. He learned years ago that travelling the day after a family celebration should be avoided at all costs. 

“Yeah.” The carrot snaps between her teeth. She says it like he needs a reminder they’re actually separate entities. “ _You_ should go.”

His hand pauses on the knife. He shakes his head. It’s not a big year. “I don’t need to be there.”

She makes a sound of annoyance in the back of her throat. “But you’d _like_ to be.”

He’s made up his mind. “No, Tess.”

“No?” She pivots back, sharp and demanding. Incredulous and angry.

“No. I’m not leaving you.” 

They’re not talking about a flight anymore.

“Not even if I’m asking you to?”

He stares at her and she stares at him until her tears fall and she walks out of the room.

 

She stands in front of him biting her lip. “I’ve been talking to a realtor.”

“Okay.” He says. 

“I just don’t think I can-“

“Okay.” He says.  
They don’t talk about who’s moving where. She doesn’t have to ask if he wants the house without her.

 

He creeps into the house after a night out with some of the guys. It’s not that late but all the lights are out so he figures she must have gotten an early night. He shuffles up the stairs in the darkness, feeling along the wall to their bedroom. The hinge on the door creaks when he opens it. 

She whispers, tears already in her throat, drowning in a worn navy nightgown. A Rembrandt, sitting on their bed. “Scott?”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on tumblr @sinkingsidewalks if you'd prefer to yell at me there. Thank you so much for all the love on this series, it truly means the world.


End file.
